


101 Ways To ACTUALLY Die While Working On Your PhD

by MlleMusketeer



Category: Transformers (Bay Movies), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, College, Gen, Graduate School, Humor, Kidnapping, Mild Innuendo, Occasionally dark political humor, Pranks, Self-Insert, Sexual Humor, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-07
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2018-09-30 14:58:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 18,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10165517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MlleMusketeer/pseuds/MlleMusketeer
Summary: So I noticed that there's been a certain amount of disdain for self-insert fics, whether they be explicitly self-insert, or involve OCs. So I decided to write one, because let's face it, the world's currently a mess and a bit of good fun never goes amiss.This is the universe in which the Autobots settled down, got established in the southwestern United States and after a while, entered into various research partnerships with a major university. Vaguely Bayverse with overtones of IDW and G1, and centered around the lives of graduate students involved in this research partnership. Entirely intended to be fluff and humor, but this is me writing it...





	1. The Perils of Christmas

I live in a desert in the United States, in a city with a university. That should narrow things down to about five states. I have a Chihuahua-mix-ish-monster who lives with me and eats my housemates’ socks. I’m a graduate researcher, and I’m studying bioethics for my PhD. Specifically, I work with human/Cybertronian bioethical differences and similarities, a field which is mostly just me. Autobots haven’t been around for all that long, after all. And I got really, really lucky, which is a slightly grimmer and more absurd story than I’m planning to tell this evening. Not when I can talk about Autobots and Christmas shit. Oh man, welcome to my life for the last month… 

…and if my supposed ‘protector’ Jazz springs Jingle Bells on me _one more time_ when we’re on a drive together, I am going to hide french fries in the seams of his seats. Protector, my ass. He’s going to drive me nuts before next semester even starts, just watch. (Prowl thought that sticking him with the nervous, shy, workaholic grad student would keep him in line when he was around the base. Prowl was wrong. It just taught me bad habits.)

Winter in the desert is, surprisingly, _really fucking cold_. The dog is not designed for cold. I am not designed for cold, but of the two of us, I am the one adult enough to wear a sweatshirt when I need it, instead of looking profoundly resentful every time one is put on me. Or chewing on it.

Cybertronians, like computers, love the cold. They’ll put up with the heat, but they don’t get a hell of a lot done. Mostly, they bask and enter what’s more or less snooze mode. Hard to tell if you’re a human—they’re advanced enough they don’t seem particularly stupid to us, but downright moronic to each other. My first winter working with NEST, I got to watch Jazz getting more chipper as I got colder, sleepier, and angrier with every passing day. 

Let us simply say that our relationship got a little bit strained that winter. Jazz being chipper is…well, wow. Early on, I had to make a strict rule. No Christmas music while driving until the 20th of December. At least, no constant Christmas music. Something here and there, fine, but no, I am not up for three straight hours of all the peppier modern reimaginings of Christmas carols until the 20th. And honestly, I’d prefer to keep it all pre-1930, because I’m a Christmas music snob. But I absolutely lost _that_ battle, and had to compromise. 

(Jazz is pushing it again this year with _fucking Jingle Bells dammit Jazz.)_

That was because Jazz is fascinated by human traditions, the sparklier the better. The 4th of July was great! There were explosions! Sparkly explosions! It was within the first month of my involvement with NEST, and I was still honestly intimidated by my august protector (head of special operations? The hell had I done to merit that sort of attention? I was a first year grad student, for fuck’s sake, I was still having trouble finding the bathroom, and I made seven sorts of rookie mistake every day! I was going to be lucky if they let me know where the coffee pot was at the base, let alone gave me an office!), so seeing him perch on top of the overpass and cackle delightedly at every salvo of fireworks was a bit surprising. Not to mention the hours he later spent grilling me about where to buy fireworks (I’m from California, I didn’t know, fireworks are illegal where I come from because, well, fire) and then the later session with the rest of Spec Ops in the desert, figuring out what did what, in which at least one of his officers leaned over the firework to see why it hadn’t gone off yet, with predictable results. Jazz congratulated him. They had, he said, a new, accurate idea of the practical uses of the things. 

I think Megatron is still trying to figure out what of Wheeljack’s new inventions causes freshly processed energon to explode in stars and balls and smiley faces to delight young and old, but most certainly not the Decepticons who’d just finished said processing. 

So the 4th of July was a blast, and then Halloween was also a blast, because Ratchet had worked out the last few bugs in the hard-light avatars (with notable help from Perceptor, who had the distinct advantage of giving a fuck; Ratchet’s animations on his avatar are notoriously bad. Ratchet, more often than not, has his holoform pop straight out of his closed door, still in a sitting position. He also doesn’t often try to animate the face, so he’ll talk to someone about the most dreadful things while his avatar’s face is stuck in a creepy, Ken-doll grin) and Jazz parked in the driveway and helped greet trick-or-treaters. 

He had a great time. The neighborhood kids had a great time. I didn’t have to get up every five seconds, so I also had a great time. Megatron did not have a great time. Megatron unfortunately was not stupid enough to believe that Shockwave’s newest invention had been sabotaged by a swarm of Deadpools. Megatron blamed Spec Ops. 

Optimus somehow managed to keep a straight face while briefing various important people about the sabotage of said invention, which was the most impressive part of that. 

Thanksgiving, Jazz decided, was kind of a bust. I went home to see my folks. It was mostly about ingesting organic matter. It didn’t offer much amusement other than encouraging Wheeljack to make a gun that shot frozen turkeys, and while that actually did cause a certain amount of damage (Starscream found out, to his horror, that Earth jokes about the damage a frozen turkey can do to an airplane are, in fact, based in reality), the ammo was a) expensive, and b) Prime felt it could be better used feeding families than shot at Decepticons. Prime wasn’t wrong, but Jazz felt it took a lot of fun out of the whole thing.

But Christmas.

Oh, Christmas.

It was _shiny_. It was full of _noise_. There were _carols_. And all sorts of bizarre things. Optimus looked hilarious in a Santa beard, and in a Santa hat, and it was Jazz’s despair that he never managed to get Optimus in both, only one or the other. Megatron also looked hilarious in a Santa hat but that lasted all of five seconds, because it was a supremely lucky throw and never was replicated, and the glue Jazz used needed time to set up which Megatron’s outraged reflexes did not give it. 

There were _trees_ indoors. And so much glitter. So, so much glitter. Tinsel. Wreaths. Jazz dragged me along on a shopping trip, asked me to pick out the items that would cause the worst trouble, and then left Bumblebee on curbside duty for me for a _week_ while he went off to apply them. All he’d tell me afterwards was that the poinsettia was particularly effective. I had _no_ idea what that meant, but shortly thereafter, Megatron hijacked all transmissions he could, and _declared war on Christmas_.

I think Fox News jizzed itself. 

Optimus ended up hitting Megatron with an entire Christmas tree, the one from downtown which usually gets nailed by a drunk driver by the 23rd, sending ornaments everywhere, and then wondering like hell why so many people were excited because it was, ultimately, a pagan symbol. 

Fox News tried really, really hard to ignore the fact he’d said that. Megatron, after all, was a giant metal socialist. Optimus was red, white, and blue. It was obvious which was more American. Everyone suffered slips of the tongue. 

The next Christmas, Jazz sent Megatron a beautifully wrapped box of scraplets. Starscream stole it and opened it. Megatron was surprisingly more okay with Christmas after that, and Starscream screeching about Christmas while covered in scraplets became a meme. 

Through all this insanity, Jazz had never gone to get a tree with me. He’d been too busy with the pranks, (oh, sorry, sabotage and espionage) after all. So this Christmas, my third, when I’d finally settled well and truly into the drafty little old house, I decided to include him. 

He was delighted, at first. 

We picked out the tree. The tree rode home in the passenger seat, because Jazz had to be a smartass and choose a sporty, sexy altmode you couldn’t get groceries home in. 

I’d offered to drive the hatchback but he huffily refused said offer. Every time I got in that car, I got quoted the statistics about driving accidents, if not from Jazz than from one of the other Autobots. Given that Jazz is _useless_ for Costco runs, I got the lecture monthly at _least_ from _someone._ Honestly, I don’t think my driving’s _that_ horrible. But Cybertronians are all deeply committed to the belief that anything a human does with a car is six times more dangerous than what they do every day, because _it’s them doing it. This includes backflips off overpasses._

I got the tree out and carried it into the house; Jazz transformed, started to step over the fence into the backyard and went, very quietly, _“Gah.”_

“What’s up?” I asked. 

“The leaves,” he said, profoundly unhappy. “They’ve _gone places_.”

“Transform back,” I said. “I’ll get the shop-vac.”

Which was how I wound up vacuuming a Porsche in my backyard at 10 pm and the dog chewed off an entire branch from the tree while we weren’t looking. It was a fun night. Unfortunately, Jazz didn’t manage to utilize the tree thing on Megatron, which was doubly insulting to his pride, and Bumblebee laughed his ass off. Apparently, he and Sam had figured that one out their first Christmas. Though, in his case, he’d transformed _with the tree still in his trunk._ Ratchet had to be called. 

Between Optimus and the Christmas tree shenanigans, Ratchet was beginning to really hate trees.


	2. The Talk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which awkward subjects are stumbled upon, and biology students aren't nearly as easily embarrassed as Autobots expect.

You know, I still can’t figure out if Jazz was yanking my chain re Autobot sex.

It came up innocently enough.

“Yeah,” I said, chucking my backpack on the passenger seat and settling down, “Long day. Daphnia lab, all the students were excited about finding a pregnant one. Wanted to know if they could get extra credit.”

“Could they?” asked Jazz, who focused on the important things in life.

“No,” I said. “Wasn’t as if they were the ones to knock it up.”

There was this pause.

It stretched. 

“…they can’t do that, can they?” asked Jazz after a time, and I realized that he’d probably googled daphnia, and then spent the rest of the time _trying to figure out how that worked_. It had taken a good couple of seconds. Given the speeds they could think at, he’d been really stumped. 

“No, no they can’t. It was a joke.” We got back to my house. I let the dog out. I played a short game of tug of war with the dog, then climbed back into Jazz with her and my computer; I meant to get some work done while he went on patrol today. He even made sure I had wifi while he did so—out in the middle of nowhere, it beats me how he managed, but spec-ops, he says, has its ways. 

We drove for a while in silence. 

“Ya had me goin’ for a bit there,” Jazz said at last. 

I snickered. “I guessed as much. No, no, that’s impossible.”

“Could have told me first. I didn’t need that in my search history.”

That made me laugh even harder. “Welcome to grad school, dude. Besides, I bet the NEST interns have even worse search histories.”

“Oh Primus yeah. Fritzes Red Alert, goin’ through them. At least once a week someone googles ‘how does Cybertronian sex work’. Or something less grammatical. At least none of the online speculation comes close, though I think Bee’s been contributing a bit to some of the crazier theories.”

“Of _course_ he is.”

Pause.

“Wait. _Do_ you…” I cut myself off. Personal questions and all. I should have known Jazz better—he doesn’t have an embarrass-able plate in his body. 

“Yup,” he said, gleefully. “And you’re the first person to ask straight-up, instead of googling. Good job.” 

“What, even Captain Lennox?” 

“If he’s asked, Ironhide’s not telling.” Jazz snickered. “And Sam’s an awkward college guy. You can imagine how that would go.”

Yeah. I could. Some of the freshmen in my class _blushed_ over the daphnia. 

“Dare I ask more?”

“I dunno, do you?”

I did. After all, I did my undergrad in biology. Biologists only think about sex, poop, and death. One of those was a little too relevant to ask Jazz, one was, I hoped to god, not applicable, and the last a great big, embarrassing mystery. 

I’m pretty sure he was pulling my leg for the whole thing. 

I do not for an instant believe that Optimus has _six._

Six what? you ask. 

That’s for me to know…and regret knowing.


	3. Jazz and Groceries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which overprotective Autobots learn the horrors (read: tedium) of grocery shopping.

There’s something about ordering at the butcher’s counter at a grocery store that makes you feel like a Real Adult, and plus, my local grocery store often has better prices at the butcher’s counter. Which is great, because one of my few sins is the amount I spend on food.

“Anything else?”

“A pound of the double-smoked bacon, please.” The guy behind the counter and I shared the grin of the unapologetic bacon lover. 

“Great stuff.”

“God yes.” Okay, the double-smoked bacon wasn’t that economical but it was _good._ There’s no point in being unhealthy if you don’t _really_ enjoy it.

_Bee-deep._

I accepted the brown paper packages I’d ordered, gave the guy another grin and polite farewell, and went to look at the veggies. Again. I was making up my mind about the bok-choi, which were expensive, but the cheap ones were another 20 minutes of driving away, at the international market.

_Bee-deep._ I frowned down at my phone and pulled it out. Text from Jazz. _How much longer u going to b in there?_

I grinned at the texts, their mash-up of complete sentences and text speech typical of a Cybertronian texting. They tried text speech, couldn’t quite get the hang of it. 

_Bee-deep._

_Seriously._

_Bee-deep._

_I am SO BORED._

“Serves you right,” I muttered to the phone. You see, Jazz had been getting over-protective lately. All the ‘bots had. There had been the annual report of causes of morbidity and mortality in the US last week, and unfortunately, I’d been the conduit through which it’d gotten to the ‘bots. Hey, I’m taking classes in policy on top of my ethics coursework. It’s all in a day’s work for me.

And had totally panicked Jazz and co. Because right there, right at the top of causes of accidental death? And near the top of overall causes of death? 

Motor vehicle related incidents.

See, we all _know_ , intellectually, that getting behind the wheel is the most dangerous thing we do on a daily basis. Hell, it’s one of the most dangerous things we do, period. We just sort of accept it, that yeah, sure, there’s a chance we could get ourselves killed or injured every time we go to the store, and then we ignore it, because going to the store needs to happen with the minimum of gibbering terror.

Which is why it took me until I was 21 to get my license, but that’s tangential to the whole issue. 

So Jazz got ahold of my iPad, open to said report, and, because ‘head of special ops’ translates to ‘incurable fucking snoop’ in personal relationships, read it, and then he chirped it to Optimus, and Optimus, who goes around vacuuming up interesting information about humans like my dog sucks up spilled shredded cheese from the kitchen floor, hadn’t quite run across that tidbit yet, and freaked. In a very gentle and stately manner, _of course_ , because he’s still Optimus Prime. But he freaked.

The reasoning went thus: the humans are risking themselves daily driving to work. It is probably the riskiest thing they do every day. 

This includes the human researchers. Actually, it especially means the researchers, who are crossing town on a daily or weekly basis to get to the base.

And to go to the grocery store. And things like that.

Cybertronians are far better drivers than humans. It’s more like walking to them. Besides, they can always transform and save the human, right? Or just dodge.

So for all the ‘bots with human friends, Optimus suggested that they try to minimize our driving time.

Which why my name was mud on base just now. It’s all very well and good for Sam, because Bumblebee _is_ his first and only car, and they have something worked out with driving, but for Captain Lennox suddenly dealing with a very protective Ironhide? Hoo boy. And of course it’s my fault, because I was the twit who left my tablet lying around where an incurable fucking snoop can find it. 

Because of course the jerk’s figured out how to get past the fingerprint scanner. No boundaries.

So I was pissed too. Not only because of the lack of personal boundaries, not only because Jazz was trying to babysit me, but because I too had a car I’d brought with me to grad school, and I preferred to drive myself, thanks. Meant I didn’t have to wait to go shopping. There’s also just the simple fact of, yeah, I love my research, I love the ‘bots, but I want a life outside of that, too. Oh, and also, I’d like to be able to go to a party without coordinating with Jazz. Ya know, little unreasonable things like that.

Oh, and I liked my car. His name was Blur, which for some reason made Jazz laugh hysterically when I told him, and he was a Honda Fit, a nice little car that resembled nothing more than a fat, happy, blue tadpole. He could haul like a pickup truck if I needed to, and I’d gone camping in him repeatedly, and he got 40 mpg. Jazz was wonderful, but he had _nowhere to put the fucking groceries._ Let alone camping supplies. Or the dog crate.

Jazz had looked up the safety specs on Blur when he’d first realized I drove _that thing._ Blur’s tadpole-ness was not, Jazz felt, an endearing quality. Especially when the info on the 2013 Honda Fit came back, saying it scored top points in collisions from all directions save the front, which it tanked on. Probably because the snub-nosed design meant that in a front-end collision, the driver would receive a lapful of engine. 

“Okay,” I’d said, “then I won’t run into anything with the front of the car.”

Jazz had made a gesture like a human tearing their hair, both hands on his sensory horns, and gone, “ _Arrrgh!_ ”

Honestly, it wasn’t the best retort, I’ll admit that. But it lost me the argument. Jazz was taking me grocery shopping. Blur sat sadly in the driveway, and got sat on by the neighborhood cats. 

But I had one final volley in my arsenal.

You see, grocery shopping is _fun._ I get to putter around and think about eating tasty things. I get to stare at all sorts of tasty things, and decide what I’ll get and what I’ll do with them, and it’s just plain nice.

Translation: I can and will spend an hour per grocery store, if I think I can get away with it. 

Which brings us back to the bok-choi and my angrily _bee-deep_ ing cell phone. 

I pondered the bok-choi, then decided to go to the international market. Now it was apple time. This store had _an entire stand dedicated to apples_ , some of which I could only find in the farmers market back home. I decided to rub it in a little more. I pulled out the phone and took a picture, then texted it to Jazz. _Look at all the apples_ , I said. _Deciding on one variety this week’s going to be hard! Pink Lady is one of my favorite, but there’s definitely a new variety here I haven’t heard of…_

_You are EVIL_ , the response read.

_Hey, I’m not even at TJ’s yet,_ I sent. _We’ll hit that next._

_ARRGH._

I snickered, and went back to the apples. 

_Bee-deep._

I looked at the phone, expecting more robot bitchery, and instead saw, _Do not come out the front of the store._

“The fuck?” I said aloud, and then I heard it.

The crash.

The distinctive sound of a large robot fist hitting a large robot face. Or other body part. A sort of clanging thump. And then a screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech of metal on asphalt.

“Oh,” I said. Well, so much for the shopping. Apparently I was evacuating a grocery store today, if the manager didn’t get their act together right quick.

* * *

 

A tumultuous half hour later, involving a lot of speaking calmly in a loud voice and directing people out the back of the store and to a safe distance, and free groceries, I sat in the parking lot next to Jazz, who was picking bits of metal out of his fists and looking sheepish. 

“Well,” he said.

“Well,” I said.

“I didn’t realize Barricade was around. He’s using some sort of cloaking technology we’re unfamiliar with,” said Jazz, looking, if possible, even more sheepish. “It wasn’t planned. I think he picked up my signature and took the opportunity.”

I looked around the parking lot. Jazz and Barricade had been hurling shopping carts for a bit there. There was one in a tree, looking oddly festive, surrounded by bright yellow palo verde blossoms. “I see,” I said.

“Clean up should be here soon.” Jazz stood, and winced as he did. Barricade had scratched his leg pretty good, though he assured me it was fine. Ratchet was on his way anyhow, because he couldn’t trust any of the Autobots to accurately report damage, slaggit. “Um.”

Pause. 

“Maybe,” said Jazz, in the distinct tones of someone conceding a point they really, really didn’t want to concede, “maybe you _are_ safer doing the shopping in that little blue death trap.”

I grinned. That was about as good as I was going to get.


	4. Chapter 4

So the story of how I, nerd by day, supernerd by night, wound up with Autobot protection ought to be told. Or at least part of it. It was mostly due to The Paper That Made Everyone Hate Me.

First of all, due to a series of increasingly implausible incidents, I published a paper that pissed off Megatron, bewildered Optimus, and enraged Ratchet—and my advisor, and a bunch of people in my field. Long story short, the field of bioethics is not a placid lake. Tempest in a teapot is closer to it. Tempest in a teapot with laser guns, now.

Technically, due to confidentiality and all, when a paper is in-press, people don’t share it widely; the reviewers aren’t supposed to chat about what they’re reviewing. But the journal I submitted the thing to has a digital submission portal and doesn’t take paper submissions, and anything digital, Jazz tells me, is something that Soundwave can get into. Nevermind that whatever system sent the paper to the reviewers may have been less secure than might be hoped.

Which I really wish I’d known to start with. Because the result was, about three weeks before I was supposed to find out whether the thing had been accepted or not, Megatron found out about the paper. A paper in which I’d quoted him. For which I’d interviewed him (long story, blame Sam Whitwicky, because who else). And blew a gasket.

So toward the end of June, when everything is just beginning to get unbearably hot and tempers (human and Cybertronian) are starting to fray, it comes to Optimus Prime’s attention that one of the human graduate students loosely associated with NEST (I’d gotten a base pass, very restricted, written and had the protocols for my research approved—just interviews, all temporary, had started the research proper, but was a significantly less august personage than the interns responsible for getting Starbucks) was getting Decepticon death threats. He wasn’t pleased. Never mind that Ratchet apparently was Reviewer #2 (no, you’re not supposed to find these things out, but since when has Ratchet been observant of rules when it doesn’t suit him? The answer, according to Jazz, is never...) on the paper, and was as about as delighted as Megatron about said paper. He was all too happy to give Prime the rest of the details, which, again, you’re not supposed to do. But there aren’t really rules for how to apply this when someone is at risk of becoming paté, so he got away with it.

From my perspective, it looked like this:

6 am on my fucking birthday: Decepticon death threat regarding the paper. Cell phone, email to every email address I owned, tumblr message, facebook message, twitter, everything. At the same goddamn time. Somehow overrode all the silent modes on my devices. My room was a hellstorm of cheery binging, beeping and clicking for about three minutes. That was worse than the stated intention to turn me into paste, really.

6:10 am to 11: contact advisor about what to do about death threat, chew fingernails, get very useless email back, shrug, contact police and the NEST representative, go teach class because lab won’t wait for death threats, and I am quite literally more scared of my lab coordinator than Megatron. Megatron doesn’t write my paychecks. I am a grad student and have fucked-up priorities, okay?

11 am: Get contacted by Optimus fucking Prime about the fucking paper (spot where my morning went to shit/off the rails. Base pass does not equal even seeing Optimus Prime. I was too far down the food chain for that.)

11:10 am: Get picked up by a bunch of really buff guys in a humvee, one of whom starts explaining the situation to me as if I’m four, come on dudes, I’m a grad student not an idiot…okay, fine, actually those things are the same.

12:35 pm: Arrive at Autobot base

12:55 pm: Spend 20 minutes kicking my heels in what looks like an office 40 feet off the ground while people stare at me, have yet to (I think) see an Autobot. (I was wrong, actually; it wasn’t a humvee, it was a Topkick, and it was Ironhide, and that one guy was just pretending to drive, and Ironhide snickered about this for weeks, because that’s absolutely the level of Ironhide’s sense of humor.)

1:00 pm: Call from angry lab coordinator for not showing up to teach lab, try to explain, dude in a suit shows up and offers to take the phone. Since I am now enduring the full blast of an outraged lab coordinator, I comply. It suddenly is a very short phone call. She even apologizes.

1:01 pm: Meet Optimus fucking Prime.

1:30 pm: Have a really excellent talk with Optimus fucking Prime about my paper; he really can learn everything about anything very quickly. Like, in an hour.

2:00 pm: Finish substantially less excellent talk about the fact that me becoming paté is a serious risk, and what the hell did I do? Also, he is a little taken aback I’m not involved more with the Autobot/human research initiative; he thinks I should be much more involved, not just a visitor. It’s a very promising paper, he says, though unnerving.

2:01 pm: Pause.

2:02 pm: Ask Optimus fucking Prime if he could be the co-chair of my committee.

2:03 pm: HE SAID YES.

2:15 pm: SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK SHIT SHIT DID I DO THAT SHIT FUCK DAMMIT WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF I AM REALLY NOT GOOD ENOUGH SHIT FUCK DAMMIT SHIT SHIT SHIT HE’LL HATE MY WRITING SHIT

2:30 pm: FUCK FUCK FUCK GAAAAAH HOW DO I TELL MY ADVISOR

2:45 pm: FUCK FUCK SHIT BUGGER DAMN 

2:50 pm: why do I do this to myself

3:00 pm: Okay he looks like he’s finishing up oh shit did he just ask a question what did he ask quick nod look like you understand

3:05 pm: Wait shit what does he mean, someone to keep an eye on me, am I getting a bodyguard dammit should not have zoned out in front of the new chair of my committee

3:10 pm: Met Jazz.

It didn’t go well.

The discussion between Optimus and Prowl about who it would be best to assign to keep an eye on me took place that morning; Jazz had been told about it about twenty minutes before he met me, and he was not pleased. He had things to be doing. Important, Megatron-irritating things. Babysitting was none of the above.

Besides, that last prank he’d pulled with Sunny and Sides hadn’t really been that bad.

He looked down at me. I looked up at him.

“I’ll leave you two to get acquainted,” said Optimus, and left.

Silence.

“Well,” said Jazz, “I suppose if Bumblebee can manage with Sam…”

I had not met Bumblebee and had no idea what Sam he was talking about at this point, so the sentence made no sense to me. I just stared at him.

“So,” he said, flopping on a pile of shipping containers arranged in a roughly Cybertronian sized chair shape, “what do you do for fun?”

Which was where things really went downhill.

For fun? I stay in and write. Or I go for a walk. Or I cook, or sew. I go camping. I go hiking. I do not, in fact, do basically anything that counts in Jazz’s book as fun. Except swing dancing. Erratically. And badly. But he perked up like nobody’s business when I mentioned it. Going exploring, yes, that was pretty okay, we’d be doing a lot of that if I wanted to come along on his (safer) patrols. Other than that? Nothing.

It’s quite an experience to watch 15ish feet of robot sort of deflate. To be fair, Jazz, though not pleased with the situation, was resolved to make the best of it. But I’d just told him that the best of it wasn’t going to be all that fun. And I was feeling guilty because look, I hadn’t meant to piss the giant destructive robot dictator off, it had just sort of happened. I mean, no one expects giant robot dictators to read the bioethical literature, that’s well outside the job description! I’d not only pissed Megatron off, but I’d chosen literally the most boring way to do it and now this nice big robot was looking at me like I tended to look at iceburg lettuce—with a sort of resigned determination to do what was polite (in my case, eat the flavorless, useless vegetable; in Jazz’s case, interact with someone who seemed to him to be the human equivalent). God. This was going to be horrible and boring for both of us.

We both turned out to be wrong about that, as it turns out. Eventually.


	5. Chapter 5

Okay. So I’ve had a bunch of curious requests about what the hell I wrote in a paper that pissed _both_ Megatron and Ratchet off. The short of it is that it’s a long story. The long of it is this:

In grad school (at least in the sciences), you don’t pay the school. Often, the school should pay _you_. Now, with the economy fucked up, often it doesn’t quite work this way, but for PhD students like me, it usually still works like this. Mind you, your actual wages put you _well_ below the poverty line, but usually you can sorta make it work.

The standard arrangement for this is that you work for the school on a part-time appointment either in research or teaching. The school passes itself a check for your tuition and health insurance and assorted lovelies, and then passes you a considerably smaller check with which you are supposed to somehow make rent and feed yourself. Research happens every so often; far more common is getting a position as a teaching assistant, or TA, for a class. Being a TA often sucks; you do all the shit the professor doesn’t want to do, which is largely being the intermediary in the merry war the professor and the students perpetually wage over what should constitute sufficient effort to earn a passing grade. You have (often, though I’ve worked with far better profs who _do_ involve their TAs in class design/decision making) limited ability to affect policy, but if anything goes really wrong with your class, it’s your fault. Also, they will jack your teaching load up as far as they possibly can between semesters, and god help you if you attend an institution at which the TAs aren’t unionized. You will be screwed.

But it pays tuition. 

An extra god help you if you get the morning labs. 

Which I do. 

7:30 am, to be exact. Three of ‘em.

GAH. 

Anyway, so it was the fall semester before the Paper That Made Everyone Hate Me. I was teaching a lab class. It was August. It was fucking hot, interspersed with thunderstorms, and for the gritty icing on the shit cake, dust storms too, which are like thunderstorms if you replace the entire rain thing with horrible blowing dust. The light outside can go from sunny midday to I-think-I-saw-this-in-Interstellar brown in about 5 minutes, which is as much time as you have to dive undercover after you get the weather service alert to when the storm hits. They’re gross. But I digress. The point is, August around here is the armpit of the year. 

There had been some confusion with the rosters of my three classes. This one student had apparently been repeatedly misplaced. They didn’t wind up in my lab, but had been listed there for a few hours while this was awkwardly sorted out. I went ‘meh’, because it wasn’t my fault, and I couldn’t do anything about it, and I didn’t particularly _care_ whether or not the dude was in my lab, not if I didn’t know anything about them. Turns out I should have paid attention. 

Motto of my life, really.

Anyway, there was this field trip. It was on a weekend. It involved the TAs driving those godawful 15-seat vans that handle like bricks as we took the kids to the botanical gardens (yes, if you are in college, chances are your TAs call you ‘the kids’ behind your backs. They learn it from the professors. Besides, it reassures that one TA you’re inevitably older than. Yes, you’re probably older than at least one of your TAs. Secret lives and all that, right?) and prayed not to die in the like, five mile trip, because have I mentioned those things drive like bricks?

So there I was, driving a white van with the University’s logo stamped all over it, glad at least the damn thing had government plates so I couldn’t be pulled over for rank incompetence, while also praying that said rank incompetence wouldn’t kill everyone in the van, when a giant robot swept down out of a clear blue sky and kidnapped the entire van.

It’s a good thing I’m a real asshole about making everyone buckle up.

There were screams. I just sort of clutched the wheel, yelled at everyone to stay calm and in their seats. AS IF. I felt like an idiot even as I said it; this was not a situation it was easy to stay calm in—but there’d be fewer broken bones from being flung around if seatbelts were in play, and the ground was already far enough away that jumping had become a very terminal option. 

I had just finished signing all the forms, waivers, ect to conduct research at NEST. This included a will. I’d fucking _laughed_ at the thing when I’d turned it in. I was a bioethicist! Bioethics wasn’t exactly risky. Definition of ivory tower, really, and this according to _academic researchers_. I mean, _really_. But I signed all the forms, all the waivers, and even drew up the will with a certain amount of amusement. After all, one could always get hit by a bus while crossing the street. A will wasn’t the worst thing to have on hand to fairly distribute my pitiful savings. I didn’t even have a dog at that point. 

Now, that will was suddenly _very_ relevant.

Because, if my memory served, the purple and black robot carrying us was _probably_ a member of the Decepticon command trine and we were—

_VWOP_

—boned. A note for the unexperienced; Skywarp’s teleport ability _sucks_ when you’re a passenger. 

We were so fucked. We were so so so fucked. I spent a moment in an agony of guilt over the fact my research project had doomed my students to an early grave. For fuck’s sake, I’d only just had the protocols approved! I didn’t know interviewing Autobots about similarities and differences in patient autonomy would be dangerous! I’d thought my worst problem would be _Ratchet_ , who abruptly seemed like the sweetest, fuzziest person ever, and I’d never even _met him_. I was interviewing his staff, after all, not him, because he was _too damn busy._

I should mention here again that I was very small fry indeed at NEST at that point.

I really, really hoped I’d be seeing Optimus Prime somewhere. Any minute now.

About then, Skywarp dropped us, none too gently. Thank god the van stayed upright, but there was some serious screaming and this time I joined in. If I survived, I thought, clinging to the wheel like it was my best friend, I would have to be surgically removed from this steering wheel, because _I was never letting go_. 

Which was when I realized we were on the ground again, and had a functional van. I slammed the accelerator—

—and a claw came down and punched through the engine like it was a slice of bread. Not Skywarp’s. So much for that. Before I could decide what to do next, the roof of the van rolled up like the lid of a tin of sardines with a horrible noise of splintering plastic and screeching metal and I was looking up at Megatron. 

There were many more intelligent things I could have said.

There were even more profane things I could have said. 

What I actually said was a very small, “Oh dear.”

Megatron stared at us for several long seconds. 

Then, “ _Skywarp!_ The boy is not _here!_ ”

And fixed a glare on me.

What I _should_ have said was, “Due to FERPA, I cannot disclose the presence or absence of any student in this class.”

What I _actually_ said was, “Um. There was a problem with the rosters, I guess?” because I was not about to die for the fucking _Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act._ Whoever the hell Megatron was after was probably well away by now, protected by Autobots. I wasn’t putting them at risk, probably. It wasn’t like any other vans had been nabbed. My immediate problem was not dying and keeping my students alive, and I was hoping those goals would be achieved at the same time. 

Look, if I were a really good TA, I’d be able to tell you what my students were doing—if there was any terrified crying or whimpering or if some dude in the back was making paper airplanes to bounce off Megatron’s nose but to be entirely honest, I had _no_ idea. Because I was occupied with one thought, and that thought was that I _had_ to keep Megatron talking. Talking meant no mashing into a paste, right?

“Humans,” said Megatron, absolutely disgusted. 

“Yeah the computer system is terrible,” I said, which made him give me a very surprised look indeed. I think he may have expected me to sit there and wait for death, but like my grandmother before me, I am incapable of keeping my mouth shut. “No one knows how to use it.”

He stared at me, then at Skywarp. “ _Get him_ ,” he snarled, and Skywarp took off, leaving me with about a dozen Decepticons and a very grumpy looking Megatron and a bunch of terrified students. 

_Hold up_ , you may be saying. _Hold the fuck up right there, Mlle, I do not for a minute believe the universe is so fundamentally careless that you of all people would get kidnapped by Decepticons, why on Earth would they go for your van_ , and really the best I can offer as a response is Jazz’s after-action reconstruction of events. Which runs so:

There was an epic roster fuckup, and a certain college-age associate of the Autobots (particularly Bumblebee) was placed in my section for about six hours. This happened to be a period within which Soundwave hacked the university’s database to see if they could kidnap said associate. Therefore, my name and roster photo were associated with that person, and the general conclusion was that if they nabbed _my_ class _,_ they’d nab the person they were looking for. They got into the syllabus too (making Soundwave officially better informed about the course than many of its participants) and saw there was a scheduled field trip. So Skywarp was instructed to nab the van I was driving. 

Leading to what was Officially The Worst Lab I Had Ever Taught.

Megatron was still eyeballing me. 

Which gave me the opportunity to do something _truly_ outrageous.

“So,” I said, and unbuckled my seatbelt, then stood on the seat to try and feel a little less short, “It’s a delight to meet you.”

These were words that Megatron in all probability had never heard from a human before. He smirked. _That_ kind of bearings on a human, Jazz later told me, was something Megatron would at least _pause_ for. He was damn well aware of what he seemed like, damn well aware any sensible human would be utterly terrified, and fully aware that the various beings he’d killed over his long, long lifetime were more than capable of this kind of courage. He’d killed them anyway, in service of his Cause.

When Jazz told me that later on, I all but crapped myself all over again, because at the time I read that smirk as a sign that me being stupid ballsy had bounced the van from the category of things that were going to get smashed and killed into one that involved maybe not getting smashed and killed. Maybe earning the respect of the bad guys so they’d let us go. It was a long shot. The long and short of it was that it encouraged me and I grinned back at him and said, “I’m a grad student studying bioethics. I’m fascinated by Decepticon philosophy. Would you be willing to expound on that? I have forms here detailing exactly how I’d use any information you give me, so you are fully informed of the implications, and I’d be delighted with any information you’d care to share!”

You know, even with all the oh shit surrounding the whole ‘kidnapped by Decepticons’ thing, I still think my best achievement of that day wasn’t surviving, but the fact that I actually did talk _Megatron_ into signing the _consent forms_ for my interviews. He read them all, too. I was _really_ glad I’d spent hours refining them. Really, really glad. He asked more questions than the lawyer on my committee did. 

But he _agreed_. 

And it turns out, once you get Megatron monologuing? You’re all set. I set up the recorder, pulled out a notebook, and glanced over my shoulder at the students. They all had brought lunches for the botanical garden tour, so we were probably good for about six hours. Bathroom breaks, though… I hoped we wouldn’t have to deal with that. 

I didn’t dare do much more than glance at them. If Megatron thought I wasn’t listening—well, I didn’t want to find out. So I sat there and took notes and recorded and asked questions. Megatron monologued. I got a lot of useless military philosophy, but I _did_ get him onto bioethical topics eventually. 

The most important of which was patient autonomy. 

Which he was surprisingly vehement about. Apparently, a wounded Decepticon has every right to refuse treatment. The philosophy seemed to be if they’re idiots and die, so be it. It’s their right and means one less idiot taking up resources. (Decepticon bioethics, however, seem to place allowing oneself to be subject to experimentation in a different category, as a duty. Decepticon bioethics are weird, but I found this out much, much later.) It was unclear whether this was the result of resource scarcity or was a true philosophy not dictated by necessity, but I wrote it all down anyway. 

So I wrote and listened and recorded and shook out my cramping hands and made all the right noises, particularly when Megatron got onto the subject of memory surgery (about which he was oddly vehement) and in short got a spectacular interview right up until Optimus Prime FINALLY fucking showed up and punched my interview subject in the face.

At which I grabbed notebook, recorder, and instructed my students to evacuate the van and fucking hide.

We got carried out of there in the hands of several Autobots, including Ironhide and Bumblebee and Ratchet, and my students were surprisingly happy with me, given that I’d spent the last several hours interviewing the guy who’d taken us hostage, and ignoring them completely. I had a short period sort of in the limelight, but not very long because it didn’t make an amazing story, really, and then a lot of therapy. Rollercoasters are right out for me, forever. A little too Skywarp-esque.

Anyway, after a while I went back and conducted my interviews with the Autobot medical staff and found some very interesting things, namely that Autobots do not actually place strong emphasis on patient autonomy when it comes to refusing necessary medical treatment. Ratchet _will_ hunt you down. This was surprisingly consistent.

So I sat down with this information and the human bioethical literature regarding these things and wrote a paper in which I made three points that made everyone hate me:

1.) Human concepts of autonomy in patient choice to seek treatment and Decepticon concepts are fairly similar, with Decepticon concepts being somewhat more liberal.

2.) Autobot autonomy in patient choice to seek treatment is significantly reduced when compared to human and Decepticon standards. 

3.) While Autobot and human ethical standards surrounding consent to experimentation are very similar, and Decepticon standards lag far behind, the attitudes behind whether a patient is obliged to seek treatment influence a far more frequent occurrence at this stage in the war, and are an interesting indication of convergent values in two opposed factions (humans and Decepticons). This is influenced by Cybertronian history as briefly outlined in the introduction.

_Literally no one liked this._

Ratchet hated it because it compared Autobot ethical mores to Decepticon, and the Autobots came out as less respectful of personal autonomy, which was probably his fault as CMO.

Humans hated it because apparently “with Decepticon concepts being somewhat more liberal” constituted an insult. How dare I compare them unfavorably to aliens. How dare.

And Megatron?

Megatron _hated_ the implication that humans and Decepticons were in any way morally similar. 

It was a tiny paper. Teensy tiny. Ringed round with disclaimers that this was comparing one eensy bit of human bioethics and Decepticon cultural expectations, that in no way was I expanding the observations to other parts of Decepticon activity (I did get KIDNAPPED while researching this guys, I do not have warm fuzzys for the cons, thanks) but everyone skipped right over that and flipped their shit.

Got me grant funding though. 

That was worth it. 


	6. Chapter 6

I did dumb heroic shit ONCE. That was it. 

Because _nothing_ was worth what Jazz did to me when he picked me up from school the next day. 

I came down the steps from the lecture hall with the professor and the other TA. And the Porsche parked at the curb rolled down _all his windows._ And turned his stereo up to stun. Well, okay, a few steps below literal stun, which is a setting he has and uses on Soundwave and the cassettes on a regular basis, and would probably vibrate your internal organs out your ears if he used it around humans.

_“YOU GOT THE TOUCH! YOU GOT THE POWWWAAAH!”_ screamed across the road and walkways, prompting windows to go up in every building along the street, and people to run for cover. The stereo went up a little more. 

I really don’t know what prompted him to play _that_ song, but the professor sure as hell recognized it from his childhood and turned to look at me with raised eyebrows. 

“Yeeeah,” I said. Screamed rather. “I fucked up a little bit.”


	7. Chapter 7

My name is mud on the base again. 

This time, I freely admit it was my fault. 

How was I to know that I shouldn’t have answered the nice, really big, new Autobot with the red eyes honestly? I didn’t even know his name yet. He came up behind me and asked a few questions, and I being the nice friendly human I am, answered them. They were almost all innocuous, too! Hell, the one I shouldn’t have answered? “What are you reading?”

I told him. Gave him a brief precis of the plot, until Jazz showed up and carefully shooed him away and then fretted over me. I put the fretting down to that bot either a) being big and clumsy or b) a recently defected Decepticon (this was before I realized red optics didn’t denote faction). I did not in any way shape or form suppose that I’d just made Prowl’s life hell.

But I had.

Because it turns out that I was the one who introduced Fortress Maximus to _The Count of Monte Cristo._

He went and followed up by reading _Les Miserables_ , which explained why he shoved Prowl off the Main Street bridge into the town lake. Now, we live in the desert, so the water only came up to about Prowl’s waist, but Prowl sure as hell didn’t appreciate it. Imagine this, if you will: Optimus Prime hanging off the Main Street bridge by one hand wrapped around one of those goddamn pink elaborations, offering the other to a sodden, angry Prowl, doorwings hiked indignantly, streaming water and the live goldfish the city put in there to keep the fly population down, while scolding a large, teal and gray tank that’s sitting sulkily in the middle of the bridge, blocking traffic. The audible portion of the scolding ran thus: “…you know better than to resort to childish names, Fortress Maximus. You will not call Prowl Danglars; neither will you call him Javert. You have a legitimate concern and grievance, which will be dealt with, but do not waste my time or your own by indulging in these childish antics.”

That was the evening news. Megatron put the icing on the cake by sending a message about how much he’d enjoyed that evening’s entertainment. 

So yeah. My name’s mud on base. Though Jazz, thank god, thinks it’s hilarious. He says that they didn’t hire me to be an intelligence agent, and for frag’s sake, I was being civil and no one had warned me. But it goes largely unheard.

Because Director Mearing was riding in Prowl when it happened. And while there was no real harm done, (Prowl’s good at his job) she’s extremely cranky about the whole incident.

Mud, I tell you.


	8. Dumb Heroic Shit

Over the last day, I have gotten a lot of messages along these lines; “Dumb heroic shit? You’re as heroic as a bag of hammers. The hell did you do?”

And I answer: dumb heroic shit. 

Okay, so really, it went like this. 

Dog was with housemates. I was enjoying a long scenic drive with Jazz while doing my work for the week. Jazz was blasting music, I was trying to sing along, an elbow hung out the window as creosote and cacti sped by, and all in all, it was a perfect spring afternoon.

Then the Decepticons showed up and ruined everything.

Jazz said, _“Fuck,”_ and dove to the side, flicking his door open. We were up against a wash, which afforded some cover, but to the other side was a large, flat plain—a playa, as they are called out here. “Get out. Hide. Do not come out. No matter what, do you understand me? Optimus and the others will find you as long as you keep your phone on you. Stay there. I mean it.” 

I nodded, jerkily, and did as I was told, flattening myself under the palo verde and creosote, and hoping not to kick a rattlesnake. I had no idea what Jazz was on about, but I was inclined to trust him.

The Decepticon squadron came screaming overhead. Jazz turned off the road and onto the playa, doubtless ruining something about the floodplain’s delicate ecosystem. They caught up with him easily and landed, transforming as they did. My mouth went dry. One of them was Megatron. You tended to remember what someone like that looked like after they’d held you hostage with your 7:30 am lab. 

Jazz transformed as well, holding his hands out in a _hey, let’s all just calm down_ gesture familiar to anyone who works in customer service. “Hi there, Megatron. A bit outside your usual stomping grounds, isn’t it?”

I could see a bit of Megatron’s face from my hiding spot. He smirked. “I would have said the same to you, Autobot. What’s one of Prime’s favorites doing out here all alone?”

Jazz shrugged. “Sunday drive. It’s called relaxing. You should try it, might remove that stick from your tailpipe.”

The smile dropped right off Megatron’s face. His eyes narrowed. “Let’s not play games, Autobot,” he said. “You do Prime’s dirty work, so he can keep those blunt servos of his clean. And if you’re here, it’s not coincidence.”

Jazz backed away a little, setting himself like he was getting ready to fight. It wouldn’t be much of a fight, I thought, looking at the odds. He was going to get clobbered, if not killed.

“This time it is,” said Jazz. “Something you wanna tell me, Megsy?”

Megatron’s fusion cannon leveled at him. I clamped hands over my ears to block out the whine of it charging. 

“One minute, Autobot,” said Megatron. “I find myself impatient today.”

Fuck, I thought. Fuck, fuck, fuck. 

First of all, I am like my grandmother. I cannot keep my goddamn mouth shut.

Secondly, I couldn’t just lie here and watch Jazz get killed trying to protect me. Because I’d just done the very simple math. Jazz was head of Special Operations. Spies, sabotage, and all that. Jazz was Optimus’s third in command. Jazz had been fighting this war longer than even my grandmother could have recited her ancestry back (2000 years). 

I was a bioethicist and graduate researcher.

Jazz was far more valuable than I was.

If Jazz died, Earth was a lot more fucked than it would be if I did something stupid right now. 

Optimus would come looking for me. Which meant help had to be on the way. Which meant if Megatron could be stalled…

Welp.

I was recognizable. He should remember me.

I picked myself up and ran toward them. The first step was hard, but then I was committed, and there was no turning back, because they’d already seen me. Most important, Megatron had already seen me. I saw his eyes widen with first recognition, then disbelief, and I skidded to a halt at what I sincerely hoped was out of grabbing range. 

I snuck a look at Jazz, whose mouth was hanging open. Then he facepalmed.

“Hi!” I said to Megatron, who was looking down at me with a murderous expression. I sounded high pitched and breathless. “I was wondering, could we do a follow-up interview? I got so much information from that last one, and it’s my understanding that you’d like to correct some things about it?”

Megatron looked, very briefly, dumbfounded. Then he just looked _pissed._ “Of a remarkably stupid species,” he said, “you may be yet the stupidest human I’ve met.”

I resented that. After all, I _had_ met Sam Whitwicky. I gave Megatron a manically hopeful look. “Well, I brought the consent forms for my newest study! And it’s not like I get the opportunity to speak with you that often! Right now I’m researching Cybertronian Common Rule equivalents. I’m very curious about what constitutes a protected class among Decepticons.”

“ _More_ comparisons between fleshlings and Cybertronians?” The charged fusion cannon swung around to face me. It was like looking down one of the massive culverts (the ones you can drive a truck through) at the edge of town. Only it was glowing. I could feel the heat on my face, and briefly wondered whether fusion meant radioactive. After all, I wasn’t exactly a physicist. “How revolting. Your pathetic excuse for a field will be well rid of your insulting drivel.”

Ouch. My advisor was nicer when she was trying to kick me out. I raised my hands. “Hey, you are absolutely free to decline. I just thought it was worth a try, rather than trying to reconstruct Decepticon standards from an Autobot viewpoint. It’s unreliable because of subject bias, and I learned so much last time we spoke. I figured you’d want the information to be _accurate._ ”

The whine of the cannon got louder, and the heat on my face increased. Megatron smirked. “That’s assuming you survive long enough to complete another interview,” he said.

I turned my hands around and gave him two (trembling) middle fingers. Might as well go out with style. “You’re incredibly thin-skinned,” I told him, which I figured would be pretty good last words if my voice hadn’t gone squeaky with panic. 

Jazz tackled him, cannon first, making the shot meant to vaporize me go wide and set some of the trees on fire. I screamed and dove for cover as a serious fight broke out, flattening myself against the side of the road. 

The Decepticons and Jazz piled into a free-for-all that left a lot to be desired, style and accuracy wise. I was pretty sure Megatron was pummeling Bonecrusher instead of Jazz for a while there, but neither Megatron nor Bonecrusher seemed to notice. I half expected Jazz to wiggle out of the bottom of the pile and run away, but unfortunately that wasn’t how real life worked. Megatron hauled him out by a leg. Jazz immediately folded himself up around Megatron’s hand and started to try and savage anything within grabbing range.

It looked bad. I’d bought time, but not enough. I looked around for something to throw, but all the rocks were too small, and no way was I throwing my laptop, because it wouldn’t do any good and my new protocol was on there.

Fortunately, that’s when the rest of the Autobots and NEST showed up. I got scooped up by a bunch of totally unamused and horribly sweaty NEST soldiers and stuffed behind one of the nonsentient trucks for cover. Not that the battle lasted long. After their usual tussle, Megatron bugged out to leave Optimus in control of the field. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Of course, that was when people started yelling at me.

Jazz started it. He actually looked freaked out, which made me just sit there and stare at him throughout the rant. 

“I told you to _hide!_ ” he said. Yelled. It made Optimus look at him with surprise. Actually, it made everyone look at him with surprise. I sat where I was with my ass in the dirt and stared up at him. I didn’t dare stand. My legs were still too shaky. Someone had gone and gotten one of those blankets for shock and draped it over my shoulders, which was comical in the desert sun. “I told you to _stay put_. And to _not come out_. And what did you do? You came out and tried to play twenty questions with _Megatron._ If you don’t remember, the whole reason I’m having you tag along with me is because _he wants you dead, you glitched human!_ ”

He knelt, calming himself with a visible effort. Everyone was staring at me now, and by the expression on Lennox and Optimus’s faces, I was in for a lot more shouting before the day was out. “I’m here for your safety,” he said. “Not the other way around. Don’t ever do that again.” He paused. “But props for flipping off Megatron.”

There was a strangled noise from one of the humans that sounded suspiciously like, “oh my god”. 

“Jazz, report,” said Optimus.

Jazz did.

I wanted to shrink into the ground because it made me realize just how fucking stupid I’d looked from the outside. But Jazz did not sugarcoat the fact that Megatron had been aiming at his spark with a fully powered fusion cannon, which I hoped would make Optimus and Lennox a little more lenient.

Ironhide had already started laughing. Bumblebee beeped something. It didn’t sound flattering. Ratchet, who was scanning me, didn’t need to be prompted to translate. “He says even Sam hasn’t done something that stupid recently.” Then he grinned and upended a container of goo over me, blanket and all. I squalled like an angry kitten. “Oh shut up,” said Ratchet. “The ‘fusion’ part of Megatron’s fusion cannon isn’t just because it sounds cool. That’s to neutralize the radiation so you don’t end up with cancer everywhere in a few years.”

“It smells,” I said. 

“Yup,” said Ratchet, happily. “That should teach you your lesson. Now go sit in the sun until it dries up and flakes off.”

I obeyed with new sympathy for my dog on Bath Day. 

By the time Jazz, Optimus, and Lennox had finished their huddle about What Was To Be Done With The Stupid Grad Student, it was flaking off. Ratchet had me stand on a tarp and shake (I felt like the dog again), and then collected all the little bits, which he said were “a little” radioactive. 

“You’ll be driving back with Optimus,” said Jazz. Then he gave me a wicked grin. “I wouldn’t trade places with you for _anything._ ”

At least he thought it was funny, I thought morosely. 

Optimus _and_ Lennox, as it turned out. The US government needed to have a representative in my scolding, apparently. I folded my arms and sat in Optimus’s passenger seat and felt like a bad little kid. 

“We have heard Jazz’s side of the incident,” said Optimus gently. “I would like to hear yours as well. 

With an effort, I kept myself from kicking my dangling legs against Optimus’s seat. My feet didn’t even reach the floorboards. “Um. Jazz was pretty accurate. Megatron was going to blow him away, and I knew you were coming, and Jazz couldn’t stall him any longer. So I wanted to distract him.” I shuddered, thinking again of the fusion canon. “He wasn’t interested in being distracted. But he was looking at me so Jazz managed to tackle him and the shot went wide. Which was why those trees were on fire.”

“And why did you decide risking yourself for Jazz was a good idea?”

“Because he’s your third in command and your head of special operations and if Megatron fried him we’d all be in the shitter.”

I regretted my choice of words as soon as they were out of my mouth. The long silence from Optimus probably meant he’d had to google that. I was just digging myself deeper.

“Optimus, can I take it from here?” said Lennox. 

“Yes, Captain Lennox, you may.”

Lennox, who had been pretending to drive, his hands hovering a centimeter off of Optimus’s wheel, lowered his hands and turned to look at me. “Your position as a researcher with NEST is dependent on your ability to obey instructions from more qualified personnel. This isn’t just for your safety, but ours. We can’t have you underfoot because you thought you knew better than us.” _If this is a problem, you’re fired_ went unspoken. There were plenty of other places I might do this research from, with remote communications with Autobots. Being around and about the base was easily revocable. “Whatever the outcome or your motivation, it was not your call to make.”

I made myself small. “Sorry,” I said, and almost meant it. But Megatron with fusion cannon leveled at Jazz, my friend, was branded on the inside of my eyelids, more so than that cannon leveled at me. I _knew_ what I’d done had been really fucking stupid, but I wasn’t sure what else I _could_ have done. 

“However,” said Optimus, obviously feeling I’d been scolded enough, “I am glad that both you and Jazz are relatively unharmed.”

A thought occurred to me, and I sat up straight in his seat. “Wait! I think Megatron was protecting something! He seemed to expect Jazz to be there for a reason.”

Lennox chuckled, his grim demeanor dropping.

“Yes, that was one of the subjects of discussion,” said Optimus. “Another reason I am taking you home; Jazz wished to further investigate the area.”

The area crawling with Decepticons. I deflated.

The problem with pulling heroic shit is that the effects are hardly ever long-lasting. Especially if your Autobot friend is prone to charging right back into danger. 

Anyway, so that was why Jazz came to pick me up every day for a _week_ blasting _You Got The Touch_. It was horrible. I never pulled dumb heroic shit again.


	9. Sleepless in [location redacted] (seriously, you expect me to give away our location? lol nope)

I have insomnia and it sucks.

It sucks significantly less now, though. Cybertronian sleep cycles are very, very different from human ones, and Jazz is, by Cybertronian standards, also a terrible insomniac, a distinction shared between him, Optimus, Prowl, and Ratchet. Of them, Jazz cares the least about getting the recommended quantity of recharge. After all, part of his job requirement is staying awake for very long periods of time.

Ironhide is one of those annoying people who can go to sleep anywhere, anytime.

I hate having insomnia, and the various wellness things they made us suffer through in elementary school that tell you that you MUST get 8 hours of sleep a night did nothing to fix it. They made it worse. Since not following directions = I AM A HORRIBLE HUMAN BEING to little Musketeer, instead of obediently zonking out, I just had panic attacks because I was A Bad Person for not sleeping. For those of you experienced with panic attacks, you understand that they are just about the least useful thing to do ever when you’re trying to sleep. 

I progressed to giving less of a shit and viewing insomnia as free bonus extra work time in college, with the one caveat that after day three or four on three hours or less of sleep, I became kind of a dumbass—and worse yet, my body had decided this was our new normal and feeling dizzy and stupid all the time was _great_. 

Seriously, fuck insomnia.

Then a great solution rolled into my life, and he was named Jazz, resident Autobot insomniac, logging enough hours awake that even Optimus, who was pretty much having a teleconference with someone or other 24/7, looked at him askance. Jazz put his alertness down to his own special debugging program he ran that even Ratchet wouldn’t touch, for fear it would blow up.

The point was, I had my own Porsche with heated seats and designated driver and wi-fi on call basically all the time. My own _sympathetic_ Porsche. 

“Jazz?” I said, keeping my voice low for the sake of my blissfully slumbering housemates. “Hi. I can’t sleep.”

He chuckled. _“Be right there. Been meanin’ to do the 404 patrol route tonight anyway. Think you’ll like it. Lemme see, it’s what, 3am now? We’ll be out until sunrise, you cool with that?_ ”

“God yes,” I said. 

_“All right. One sunrise over the city, coming right up. I better not have to wake you up again this time, though!”_

Leave Optimus to worriedly remind everyone that 8 hours of sleep was recommended for humans (and feel faintly guilty of his own lack). Jazz egging me on to stay awake was the fastest way to get me to drop off, faster than sleep aids and with less of a hangover. 

Sure enough, once I was bundled up in a blanket in his passenger seat (he was using a holoform to avoid being pulled over) with the dog tucked in against my side, I could feel myself relaxing. I had my computer, but for the moment, I preferred to stare out the window at the streetlights going past. Jazz had tilted the seat just enough so I wouldn’t wake myself up by my head lolling down onto my chest. 

I was ravenously hungry, as one is when not sleeping, so Jazz’s first stop was a drive thru for terrible greasy goodness. All the bots have their own expense accounts with NEST. It’s supposedly for tolls and so on, but they all insist on using them to feed their humans. Jazz was no exception. I wasn’t going to argue. If you know grad students, you know that free food is one of our favorite things.

So we drove, and I stuffed myself (careful to package up all the trash and not get grease on Jazz’s interior, ew) and then stared out the window until keeping my eyes open was too much. Food comas help, I suppose.

I have no memory of when I fell asleep. It was probably hardly an hour after he picked me up. The next thing I knew was Jazz using his holoform to poke me awake to see the sunrise over the city. I dropped off after that, of course—when I woke up again, I was on base, carefully deposited on the horrible but comfortable couch in front of the tv in the human/Cybertronian shared breakroom. The dog was nestled into my side, making those little sleep-barks dogs do.

All in all, it was an improvement on previous nights of insomnia. Being manhandled (mechhandled?) was far better than freaking out in bed alone.

Primus bless fellow insomniacs, is all I’m saying. Especially robot ones. 


	10. Imagine they're all in their underwear

“I’m gonna die,” I said. 

“You’re gonna be great.” Jazz held out a finger to steady me as I kicked off my hiking boots and socks, replaced them with nylons and stepped into the only pair of heels that I owned. I wobbled. “Optimus wouldn’t have picked ya if he didn’t think you could knock it out of the park.”

“Mearing remembers the Monte Cristo incident,” I said. “And the Chancellor is in there. And a bunch of official government people. The NSF. Jazz, I’m doomed.” I reached up to adjust my glasses, reached to scratch an itchy eyelid. 

“Makeup!” Jazz said, just in time. I groaned. 

“It’s probably already smudged, isn’t it,” I said. 

“It looks great,” he said. “Very professional. Your clever disguise of not-a-grad-student is flawless. Just remember not to touch your face.”

I already didn’t touch my face; that was the primary way pathogens were transmitted. It wasn’t that I disliked cleaning up nice and feeling pretty, it was that I hardly ever had the _energy_ to do so.

“Take a step back,” Jazz said. I did. He looked me over. “Yep. You’re all set. Go make your advisor and me proud, kiddo.”

Oh god. I didn’t want to think about disappointing Optimus. Augh. I was gonna disappoint Optimus.

“You’ve run through this talk with me easily thirty times,” said Jazz. “Just relax, and let the practice do its thing.”

I nodded, jerkily. 

“Now shoo.”

I shoo’d. 

There was a lot riding on this talk. They were trying to decide whether the funding for humanities research in NEST should be cut. My funding was secure—I’d gotten the NSF GRFP for the proposed project—but a lot of other people’s necks were on the line. Given I was one of the stars of the show, with the most clearcut and publicized project, I had been picked as Person Most Likely To Make Stuffed Shirts Give Us Money. By several people, including Optimus and Lennox. Who, two weeks ago, had only just finished yelling at me for being a moron. 

So yes, I was shaking in my cheap pumps from kmart as I walked into a room filled with more important people in one place than I’d ever seen in my life to talk about my research and why it was so cool that everyone else’s research should be funded along with mine. After all, a ton of it had been sheer _luck_ , and somehow not getting smashed by Megatron and…

Gah. 

I took a deep breath and busied myself checking that everything was gonna work.

Then I tried my best smile for the assembled humans and bots (Optimus gave me one of his rare encouraging smiles, Jazz gave me two thumbs up), and began. “First of all, I would like to thank the National Science Foundation for the grant that has made my research possible…”

* * *

 

It was later.

Celebratory Thai food had happened.

A lot of it.

Someone was going to have to roll me into Jazz’s front seat to get me home.

“See?” said Jazz, grinning. “Told you it’d be fine.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who have not been given this dubious bit of advice, "Imagine they're all in their underwear" is a favorite thing to tell nervous first-time presenters. The absurdity of your audience in their undies should overcome your fear, goes the theory.
> 
> It doesn't work for me.


	11. Well, that's just Prime

Sam was on a semester abroad.

Bumblebee was sulking.

He stumped around base, doorwings lowered, looking miserable. Nevermind he could just pop over to London whenever, courtesy of magic/classified technology, Sam had taken off, and left him, and _it was terrible_. Even Mikaela was sick of his bullshit.

Arcee, the absolutely terrifying little scout who was one of the few Cybertronians who’d elected to use female pronouns, was 100% done with her assigned partner’s melodrama, and had taken to secretly doing some of her patrols alone. 

Which led to one of my favorite events, the ‘someone fucked up worse than me’. My main warning was Mikaela sticking her head into the break room and going, “Get your butt out here! You won’t believe what Arcee just did!”

I raised my eyebrows. “You sound like a human clickbait article,” I said. I was in the middle of grading. I hated grading.

Mikaela threw the rag she’d been wiping her hands on at me. “Stop being a smartass and move.”

I moved. The defected ‘cons didn’t call Mikaela “Warrior Goddess” for nothing, and she was more than capable of throwing me across the room. Besides, I _was_ curious. 

All the top brass was out when we emerged into the main room, and all attention was on Arcee….and the three humans with her.

“Oh man,” I said.

“So apparently,” said Mikaela, grinning, “one of the kids mistook Arcee for a real bike.”

“Oh _maaan_ ,” I said. “You’d think people would start looking for the badge at this rate. Did he try to steal her?” I realized there was a girl in the group. “Or she?”

“Nope,” said Jazz cheerfully, leaning on the railing next to us, far less discreet than Mikaela was being. “That’s when the Decepticon patrol came by. And as far as I can tell, it snowballed. Poor Arcee. ‘Humans multiply’ isn’t gonna fly as a reason with Mearing, though Optimus conceded the point.”

I splorfled. Arcee’s sense of humor lined up better with mine than I’d thought.

“Anyway,” said Jazz, “I’m drawing up guard assignments right now.” He tapped his head, near one of the horns, and _grinned_. “I think Prowl’s gonna _like_ these ideas.”

“Uhoh,” I said.

“Ayup,” he said, and then straightened up as Optimus looked at him. 

“Do you have something to contribute, Jazz?”

“Matter of fact, I do,” said Jazz happily, and sauntered over. “We can’t have them running about unsupervised after Decepticons have made visual contact. So, they’re gonna need Autobot friends, at least temporarily.”

A pause.

“Have you anyone in mind?” said Optimus in the sort of tone that people usually say _and why is it ticking?_ in. 

Jazz cracked his knuckles. “Oh yes. Hm. Jack with Arcee, that’s only fair. Sorry Arcee, gotta live with your actions.” 

Arcee bared her teeth at him. The fact she was pink all over made it scarier—pink is the color of energon, and Arcee sure as hell lived up to it. Jazz, ever unconcerned, turned his back to her. “Hmm. You’re Miko, right?”

“What of it?”

Oh man, someone who was going to be even snarkier than I was. I couldn’t _wait._ Maybe I’d get away with more crap. 

“Yeah, I think Bulkhead would be _perfect_.” Jazz’s best Shit Eating Grin came to bear on Prowl, whose doorwings went up. 

Then Prowl smiled, a thin little razor of a smile. “Yes, indeed.”

“And, of course, Raf with Bumblebee.”

That met with some consternation. Bee, around Sam, at least, acted the jock. The kid standing between Miko and Jack looked like the most perfect nerd ever. I was looking forward to talking with him—finally, another egghead! 

“He’s studying Cybertronian Binary,” said Jazz, still with that shit eating grin, and then I realized how he’d done it.

He’d casually hacked their school database. 

Fucking hell, Jazz. FERPA was apparently a random collection of letters. I needed to check whether there was a national security exception, I really did. Also, overkill much?

I wasn’t the only person to have realized that. Optimus was giving Jazz a rather suspicious look, Prowl looked downright disapproving, and Mearing had folded her arms. But in the end, the assignments stuck. 

And Bumblebee stopped sulking. 


	12. Knockout Research

Knockout was Primus's gift to Cybertronians. At least he acted like it. He hit on Optimus in front of everyone, which takes stainless steel balls, went through six different, increasingly expensive alt modes in the course of a week before settling on an Aston Martin in bright pull-me-over red, and even Sunstreaker thought his daily care routine was a bit much. 

As far as I was concerned, Knockout was god's gift to me. Or more precisely, since I didn't really care to go where no human except maybe Sam Whitwicky had gone before, god's gift to my research. 

Because Knockout was a newly-defected Decepticon, and unlike our other resident ex-Decepticon, Drift, he was willing to talk about it.

Well, he was willing to talk about anything. And everything. As long as it involved himself.

Though it’s hard to tell who was more upset about about my first encounter with him, Knockout, Jazz, or Ratchet. I was minding my own business in the medical bay, heading over to talk to First Aid, and came around the corner and bounced off the back of Knockout’s leg. I sat on my butt and said, “Ack, sorry.”

Knockout looked down and went “ _Aaaaugh._ ” 

“Hi,” I said, waving up at him. “I’m a researcher. Is First Aid around?”

“Ratchet, there’s a human in here and it’s talking to me.”

“Nice to meet you too,” I said. 

“Ratchet! _Why is there a human here?!”_

“Relax, I’m here to interview First Aid.” I eyeballed Knockout thoughtfully. “I don’t think we’ve met?”

Ratchet showed up about then and looked just as horrified as Knockout did. A second later, I yelped as he scooped me up. Not usual Ratchet behavior. He disliked grabbing humans, preferring us to step onto his hands. Something about texture issues. Then he hurried for the door. “Jazz, you idiot!”

Jazz came around the corner and looked relieved. “I told you to meet with me first!” he said to me, holding out his hands to take me from Ratchet. 

“Yeah but I was running late to meet with ‘Aid!” I said. “I didn’t want to keep him waiting!”

“Arrgh!” said Ratchet and stormed away. I looked up at Jazz. 

“What was that about, and who’s the new bot?”

“The new bot is Knockout,” said Jazz, unusually grave. “He’s a defected Decepticon medic, and _very dangerous_ —Oh no you don’t!” He caught me as I tried to climb out of his hands.

“But Jazz, a Decepticon medic! Can’t I ask him to—,”

“ _No._ ”

I sat down in his hands, folding my arms in a sulk. “You won’t let me talk to Drift either!”

“That’s because you’re so much more fun when you’re not hamburger,” said Jazz dryly. “Look, forget about it. I meant to tell you that First Aid’s waiting for you in the main room, because the medbay’s off limits.”

I huffed out a breath, then looked over my shoulder as Jazz carried me away. One way or another, I _would_ find a way to at least _ask_ Knockout if he wanted to participate in my project.

It took me three weeks to end up in a position where I could at least ask him. It was luck. I just happened to be in the main room, hanging out on the mezzanine grading, when Knockout hit on Optimus. 

“Hey there, sweet rims,” he said, sidling up to Optimus sidelong, much as a graduate student approaches free food from another department’s event. “You’re real heavy duty.”

Optimus looked cooly down at him. I could have sworn the wheels on Knockout’s back drooped. 

“Um,” he said, suddenly realizing his folly. “Real…heavy duty…in battle?”

Optimus looked at him with a raised eyebrow, probably emailing him the HR paperwork. 

“I’ll just be in the medbay,” said Knockout, and paused as he saw me. “You’re the one who was snooping around there, aren’t you.”

“Yeah, hi!” I popped up, sending papers cascading to the floor. “Hey, got a moment? I’d love to talk to you about research.”

A glance at Optimus, standing behind Knockout, showed him tensing up. His dumbass grad student was going to try and get herself killed again. 

“Oh? What kind of research?”

“Here,” I handed him the protocol, the release papers, and everything else. “I’m an ethicist. I study Autobot, Decepticon, and human ethics, similarities, differences, ect. Particularly in the medical field.”

Knockout ruffled through the papers using two fingers. 

“Oh, the Decepticons,” he said, and smiled. “I have _a lot_ to say about them.”

And it was as simple as that.

I got a monologue. And tons of information. And Optimus looking appalled. 

It was a good day, and yes, I hold firm to the idea that Knockout is perfectly entitled to strut as much as he likes; maybe he isn’t God’s Gift to Cybertronians, but he sure as hell was a gift to the three papers I got out of that one interview. 


	13. Mirror, Mirror

Jazz didn’t pick me up that day—instead it was a very annoyed NEST researcher in a non-sentient truck. 

“The hell’s with the carpool?” I said. I didn’t say _the fuck is with the carpool_ , because I hadn’t quite been around NEST long enough to pick up the whole _fuck is a warning that a noun is coming_ linguistic quirk. 

“You’ll fucking see,” he said, having been around longer than I had. I’d never heard anyone sound more resigned in my life. He looked like he’d just finished Reviewer #2’s edits on a paper. (A note for those not in academia: it varies which reviewer it is, but the fact that Reviewer #2 is always wrong to a horrific and insulting extent is a running joke in research, as is the desire of every researcher to respond to Reviewer #2 with _“We would like to thank Reviewer #2 for their enormous pile of horseshit, and offer our considered opinion that Reviewer #2 may go fuck themselves.”)_

“No one’s dead, right?”

“Just my pride,” he said, and turned onto the 70 West, toward base in the mountains. 

It takes a good hour to get to base on a good day, that is, without traffic. Given that the 70 is the one exception to a really rather well designed city, that hour is very, very unlikely. And my companion stayed silent the entire time, obviously seething. I was beginning to think my Reviewer #2 theory was correct. 

Finally we left city limits and exited the freeway, then turned out of Hysterically-Racistly-Named-Town-Because-The-19th-Century-Did-Not-Give-A-Shit-And-You-Can-Get-Away-With-Anything-If-You-Say-It’s-Historical, took a few turns, spent a while bouncing up and down on the bad roads, and a few more classified details later, ended up at base. 

The researcher pulled into his designated parking space, pulled off his sunglasses, and gave me one incredibly evil grin. “Have fun,” he said, and then proceeded to unpack the car as fast as possible, not even looking up at my, “Um, thanks for the ride?”

Something, I decided, was definitely Up. Hopefully not another bigass purple griffin. Sure, my youtube channel had exploded in popularity, but the couch had _actually_ exploded.

No griffin. That something turned out to be me, because when I walked into the hangar on the way to my office, some Cybertronian scooped me right off my feet with a roar of delight.

A very particular, bowel-churningly terrifying roar of delight, because _I recognized that voice._ I’d only spent hours interviewing its owner, its owner had only mildly fried me with fusion cannon radiation, and had declared his intention to kill me. 

Megatron brought me level with his face. “[Name redacted]!” he said. “How is the research?”

I did the sensible thing.

I screamed my head off. 

Having been told that I scream like a fire alarm when I mean it, I might even feel a little badly for it, but not really. What stopped me—more than Lennox coming out to see what the commotion was and shouting at Megatron, or even Starscream getting in on the shouting—was the fact that the optics in front of me were not the right color. Also, I ran out of air. 

_Then_ I said, “The _FUCK.”_

Megatron peered down at me as if I’d genuinely hurt his feelings.

“So,” said Mikaela, who’d also come out to see the fun, “have you seen that one episode of Star Trek, where they wind up in the other universe and Spock has a beard?”

“Yeeeah?” I said, for whom the answer to _have you seen that one episode of Star Trek_ was almost always yes.

“Basically that happened.”

I looked back at Megatron. “Are you saying you’re my advisor?” And that apparently mirror-universe-me was used to her advisor scooping her up as the prelude to most meetings. Good god. If that were the case here, I’d get everything in on time. 

“Yes,” said Megatron. “Although…” and now he looked sheepish, as sheepish as something with Megatron’s face could, “they tell me you do… ethics?”

“The hell does mirrorverse me do if not ethics?”

“Mathematics?”

I gave him a look of the most pure offense. My GRE scores had been textbook for someone with a learning disability; 99th percentile for both writing and qualitative reasoning, 10th for math. 

It made Megatron feel he had to explain. “I _am_ one of Cybertron’s leading experts in the field.”

From the tone, I got the feeling he got that question a lot, probably because one does not expect to see people, well, Megatron shaped teaching math, pretty much ever. I felt kind of bad for him. 

“Er,” I said. “Well, actually, I really _do_ study ethics, mostly Cybertronian and human ethics? Can I talk to you about that instead?”

Megatron sighed heavily. “Starscream’s the politician,” he said. “Perhaps you should talk to him instead.”

There were many things wrong with that sentence. I boggled at him before settling on, “Since when are politics and ethics synonymous in this country?”

There was a pause.

“Well,” said Megatron, in the tones of someone trying to be diplomatic, “the election _did_ go rather differently in our universe…”

Which was when I began reconsidering math as a career choice. 


	14. Happy returns

Jazz had not enjoyed his sojourn in the alternate universe. Not in the slightest. He came in, flopped dramatically, and groaned. “If I never do that again, it’ll be too soon,” he declared to the room in general, and to everyone’s shock, the revelation startled a snicker out of Prowl. 

It was drowned out by Bumblebee falling over from laughing so hard but you expected that from Bee.

I leaned over him. “What the hell happened?”

“First off,” Jazz declared to the room in general, “mirror universe me does indeed have a goatee. Secondly, he is narcissistic and a pervert.”

“What Jazz means by that,” said Prowl, “is that his counterpart decided he was madly in love with him. Jazz was forceful in his dissuasion.”

“Son of a glitch is dead now,” said Jazz with satisfaction. 

“We think,” said Prowl.

“I dropped him into a volcano.”

“I didn’t see him hit the lava, so I’m not jumping to conclusions.” 

“Anyway,” said Jazz, “how was your weekend?”

“Megatron is alternate universe me’s advisor,” I said. “Alternate universe me does math.”

I think I heard Optimus do a spit take. He recovered too fast for anyone to be sure.

“Also, he found out about this Megatron giving me trouble about my research. So he flew me over there to give Megatron a piece of his mind.”

Everyone froze.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Megatron just said he wasn’t nearly drunk enough for that slag and refused to talk to him.”

Prowl pinched his nasal ridge and groaned.

Then came the voice of doom from behind me."[Name Redacted], what the fuck are you doing bipedal? Get off the primusdamned foot!"

Ratchet got along well with the human doctors now. So many swear words. 

I obeyed. Because it never rains but it pours, I'd managed to come down with a foot complaint of the "you walk too damn much" variety. I'd spent the morning having some asshole with a medical degree stick a syringe full of cortisone into my fucking foot. It had fucking hurt. Somehow, I had not kicked her, or cussed her out, and was super proud of this. Then my foot felt great, because the anesthetic had kicked in. Now, I'd metabolized that and it hurt worse. Jazz kept trying to carry me to the bathroom because the sound of me slowly limping there drove everyone nuts. 

I am usually delicate and quiet as a cat. The _whap-thunk_ of my limp was driving me nuts too. I felt like I was making a mountain out of a molehill. It was a fucking shot for fuck's sake. I was being a baby. But I secretly appreciated my taxi service. 

Did you know cortisone makes you pee like a racehorse? I was spending more time airborne than working. 

Anyway I wasn't supposed to be on my feet anymore than necessary. And Jazz wasn’t as…abrupt with the grabbing as good!Megatron had been. It was a lot nicer than it might have been.

It was good to have everyone back where they belonged, is my point.


	15. Chapter 15

The first thing we knew about it was the country music.

The blasting, eardrum-curdlingly loud country music, and whoever was playing seemed to be _deliberately_ scraping the bottom of the barrel. I will listen to absolutely any genre of music, but there are always a few songs that give a genre a bad name, and what was being played was a brilliantly compiled playlist of everything that makes people cringe when country is mentioned.

And it was loud. 

Did I mention the loud.

Mikaela glared at me across the coffee table in the human staff lounge, hands jammed over her ears. “This is your robot buddy’s fault,” she yelled.

“How the hell do you know?” I yelled back, but it turned out she was right, because into the hangar came Jazz, at parade speed, gently, almost casually, wavering to block Ironhide’s attempts to get around him. Blasting stuff about how the singer loved his gun, his truck, his dog, his country, and his wife—in that order. And _cackling_. Ironhide’s engine revved in outrage.

Of course, we didn’t realize it was Ironhide at first. 

Because the truck trying desperately to get around Jazz wasn’t the nice jet black topkick we’d all grown to know and love (or fear, in my case, very much fear in my case, Ironhide had not taken to my paper well, and I was pretty sure I was somewhere on the bottom of the pecking order of associated humans, in Ironhide’s opinion, dumb as Sam and pretentious as Mearing), but a bright red pickup truck of unidentifiable make. The unidentifiable make was because whatever Ironhide had scanned had wound up being significantly smaller than Ironhide himself, so it was sort of extra beefy in ways its designers had definitely not intended. It was also lifted. It also had a pair of bull horns—longhorn, probably?— on the front, a gun rack on the roof, twin flag mounts on the ends of the bed, and, as he swerved, a very badly airbrushed American flag across the tailgate. And mudflaps with chrome edges and reclining, unrealistically endowed, female figures. In the forms of angels and demons. And a cross on the back of the cab. And, and, and, and. There was a lot of and. Every time you looked at the truck, there was something new that caught your eye. Something that screamed “city slicker who’s never done a day of work in his life, but really wants to look like he’s salt of the earth, hardworking, and oppressed so he can vote just as racistly as he wants”. 

“SHUT UP, JAZZ!” Ironhide screamed at last, but didn’t transform. “And someone, get me something _dignified_ to scan!”

“…Ironhide?” said Optimus, slowly. On the mezzanine, Lennox slowly lowered the coffee cup he had halfway to his mouth. 

“SOMETHING. ANYTHING. A TANK. A HUMVEE. I’LL EVEN SCAN A FRAGGING MOMMY VAN,” said Ironhide. “I’VE BEEN PULLED OVER THREE TIMES THIS MORNING. TWO OF THE COPS WANTED TO TALK ABOUT HOW AWESOME THIS ADMINISTRATION IS.”

Optimus turned to look at Jazz. “What happened.” It wasn’t a question. It was mostly a sigh, filled with vexation and resignation.

“So the Decepticons have a new weapon,” said Jazz.

“Does it make ‘bots look like rolling stereotypes?” said Mikaela, quietly. “God help us if they turn that on Drift…”

We looked at Jazz. Now that we actually did, we could see he wasn’t a Porsche anymore, but some sort of small, battered sedan. 

“Nah, it erases your recently scanned alt-mode data. So we scanned what was lying around, because we really needed to bail. And, well, that was the only thing available that was even close to Ironhide’s size class.” Jazz transformed back and forth, to make his point clear. “I’ll go drive around the university some this afternoon, see if I can find something new to suit me.”

“Not that that’s going to help Ironhide,” I muttered.

“Ironhide, why have you not transformed?” said Optimus. “Are you all right? Were there side-effects of the weapon?” Beneath the evenness of his voice, I could hear concern.

“No,” said Ironhide, sullenly. “Just… bring me something to scan.”

Jazz was snickering again.

Optimus was looking at Ironhide with raised eyebrows.

“…fine,” said Ironhide, and transformed.

The American flag spray wound up on his ass.

Lennox put his coffee down with a click. “I’ll go get the van,” he said. 

None of us bothered to tell him that on a military base, there were likely to be far more appropriate things for Ironhide to scan than Sarah’s minivan but our silence was worth it to see Ironhide sullenly puttering around as a much larger version of said minivan for a week, until he found something he deigned to scan to replace his old alt. 

For now, though…

“NOT a WORD,” snarled Ironhide at the room. “NOT A PRIMUS-DAMMED, FRAGGING WORD ABOUT THIS, GOT IT?”

“Got it,” we chorused, including Miko, who was engrossed with something she was doing on her phone. 

“There,” she whispered after a moment, and tilted the screen so we could see. “Uploaded to the base’s intranet!”

“You’re going to fucking die, Miko,” said Mikaela in the tones of someone commenting on the weather, and then held up a hand to high five her.


	16. Chapter 16

Remember the dumb thing I did when I tried to interview Megatron a second time? Yeah, neither did I, really. And then Optimus wanted a meeting. 

I didn’t have a clear conscience; I’d missed a deadline for a fellowship, and I accordingly sulked into the the room looking like my dog when she’s gotten into the trash. 

Optimus didn’t seem to notice. He just looked down at me, arms folded, mouth a neutral line (which was bad enough, because, and I hate to say this, Optimus Prime has the worst case of Resting Bitch Face I have ever seen, and it is not a good thing to see when you are already feeling guilty). Jazz stood next to him. Jazz looked actively unhappy. Lennox was there too. He looked like he was trying not to laugh, which was not a good sign. 

Optimus bent and lifted me onto the platform next to Lennox, which was faster than waiting for me to climb all those stairs. 

“We have secured a prestigious internship for you this summer in Europe,” he said. “I understand this will entail significant disruption to your life and that of your parents, as they are the designated caretakers of Ladybug,” meaning my sock eating chihuahua monster, “but it is necessary for your safety.”

“What,” I said.

He handed me a letter. I read it. My jaw dropped.

“I trust you’ll have no objections to your appointment,” said Optimus.

“Um. No,” I said. “Why is this necessary for my safety?”

“Megatron thinks it’s bad press a human’s made him look like an idiot twice in one year and is still kicking,” said Jazz. “So we’ll just make sure you’re elsewhere this summer, so he doesn’t know where to look.” The unhappy slant of his doorwings got still more pronounced. “Which is why I’m staying here. You’ll have other guardians this summer.”

“After all, a few of the people who turn into trains are there,” said Lennox, gesturing to the bit of paper. “Or, at least, in the city. It’s a target often enough they’re good at Decepticon security.”

Which was why I wound up leaving the country at about the same time Sam returned. “Better this way,” said Miko, “one moron on the base at a time…” and then ducked as I threw a giant, fuzzy plushy of bubonic plague at her. Raf may actually have me beat in terms of nerd toys. 

But it meant I missed Sam’s jealous tantrum over Raf’s taking his Autobot, and that was good. I missed the shocked gaping, the remarkably shrill whinging, the over dramatic moan and collapse on the couch, and Mikeala finally getting sick of his shit and getting him full on the open mouth with a waxing rag. Equally fortunately, Raf missed all of it too, being at school that day. By the time he returned, Sam was ready to act like an adult again, and Jazz was sulking about me being gone, and therefore in a mood to borrow a small human who was very good at computers…

I got all of this from Mikeala, much later. Nine hour time differences are a bitch. “Imagine,” she said, “you’d’ve thought I’d made out with Optimus, the way he was acting.” 

There was a long, pixelated pause as we both contemplated that one.

“He probably would have been less upset,” I said after a while. Mikeala snorted and nodded. “Definitely.”

Jazz’s reaction afterwards was predictable. Giant shit eating grin. “Yeah. You’re all missing out.”

But it all made me more homesick than I cared to admit. I missed the dog. I missed Jazz. I missed my housemates and the smell after it rained in the desert and my parents and even the asshole advisor. It didn't last long, though, because I had all of Europe to distract me and bonus, no Decepticons trying to kill me. You have no idea how relaxing no Decepticons trying to kill you is until you’ve tried it for yourself.

So I spent the summer in a very happy haze of cheese and chocolate and mountains shrouded in mist, and the company of the Autobot trainformers. If you thought your average Autobot was a speed demon (Bee, Jazz, Smokescreen), you haven't seen someone with a train alt and a few hundred miles of well maintained track in front of them. I spent so, so much time on trains. I think I spent more money on trains than airfare getting there. It was 100% worth it. 

I was an intern doing translational ethics at a fairly large international organization. It was nice. Before the Cybertronians landed, I’d been looking at doing comparative bioethics between human cultures, looking for the elusive balance between the need for global standards of ethical conduct and the avoidance of colonialist ethics (aka barging in and telling everyone what's right and wrong according to your culture, and enforcing those standards). So it was a nice return to a simpler time. 

Jazz snuck over at one point, changing his paint job for the occasion. Bee and Smokey had enthused about the driving, and he wanted to find out for himself. We spent a happy afternoon speeding (not really, though, the local police don't care whether or not you're a Cybertronian, they WILL ticket you for speeding. Smokey and Bee got away with it the first time because the local cops hadn’t wised up: now they just send the ticket for any unidentifiable vehicle to Responsible Parties c/o M. Optimus Prime. Most of the American cops have gotten wise to who speeds when and where, so Responsible Parties get tickets sent directly to them. Unless, of course, they’re too quick to identify. We’ve gotten at least one ticket to WHICHEVER ONE OF YOUR LITTLE BASTARDS WAS DOING 250 ON THE PEARBLOSSOM ON TUESDAY.)

“Aren't you worried about the Deceptions figuring out we’re both here?” I asked, when we'd stopped for lunch in the hills over Vevey. There was a breeze off the lake. I was unpacking a picnic lunch for myself on the warm stone next to me. It should have been idyllic, but I kept darting nervous glances into the cloudless sky. Some habits died hard. 

Skywarp is an asshole, okay? I still can’t stand roller coasters.

Jazz snickered. “Nope. Knock Out owed me one.”

That was a bad, bad snicker. “Jesus, Jazz, the fuck did you do to him?”

“Nothing. Totally volunteered himself. He’s off being obvious on the coast of California. Believe me, Starscream’s attention is in no danger of wavering any time soon.” He flicked open a door. “See for yourself.”

Jazz had one of those little gps screens in his alt mode on the dashboard. It was also good for video calls, tuning into the local news, or as a very tiny drive in. Right now, it was showing a view of a sporty speedster zooming down Highway 1. The scenic bit outside Malibu, CA. Where the cliffs drop right into the ocean and—

“I told him he could go as fast as he wanted, as long as he didn’t get caught by the ‘cons and he didn’t tell Optimus who put him up to it,” said Jazz, sounding smug. “We’ve had it closed for repairs anyway—that little Decepticon raid last week, you missed that one—so it’s not like he’s endangering humans.”

Jazz was ignoring the important part. The three _very angry_ Decepticon fliers right on Knockout’s tail. “Um. Is he going to be okay?”

“Yeah, he’ll be fine, there’s a groundbridge prepped for him if he needs it. He’s having the time of his life, promise.” And to prove his point, he turned on the audio. 

Knockout was definitely having a great time. 

After a moment, when he turned it back off, I finally blinked. “I…I didn’t know Cybertronians could do that. Is that what I think it is?”

Jazz cackled again. “Do you really want to know?”

I thought about it. “Maybe not.”

It had the intended effect. I didn’t worry about Jazz’s visits after that, and I stopped checking over my shoulder for worrying vehicles after that. 

In short, it was a totally delightful summer and I was sorry it didn’t last longer… 

…even if I may have cried a little over seeing my dog again.

Make that a lot.


	17. Chapter 17

 

The issue, I understand (badly) was that you couldn’t project holoforms very far at all, for reasons of Physics and also processing power and the average Cybertronian attention span. That was about where Perceptor lost me, because my undergrad was in biology, not physics. But Perceptor being Perceptor, he’d found a workaround within about five days of arriving on base, and very soon after that, everyone was itching to try out walking around as “humans”. 

It wasn’t that anyone was particularly in disguise anymore. It was more of an accessiblity issue. You cannot fit a 15 foot-tall robot through most doors. You just can’t. And if you do manage to find something with a big enough door, you have to know the weight limits of the floor precisely, because Cybertronians tuck a lot of mass into a very small space, and are very dense. Sure, you might have whatever-it-is rated to well above 40 tons, but is it rated to 40 tons focused on two comparatively small points? What about the other guests at the function and how much they’ll add to the overall weight? Things get even more fun when you have multiple Cybertronians involved, too…

In essence, it was just easier for all involved to hold most events outside. 

But it didn’t stop the Cybertronians from being curious about normal human life. Jazz despaired he couldn’t be present at any of my lectures, because the best parking spaces for those halls were out of holoform range from the halls themselves. He also wanted to go to concerts. Due to Bee, movie dates were thoroughly off the table for Sam and Mikaela, because he really didn’t like getting left solo. Raf, too, wasn’t happy; he wanted Bee to come to his summer internship final presentation, and Bee couldn’t. Miko and Bulkhead found some sort of workaround and I really didn’t want to know what that was. Arcee was a) tiny and b) made of murder, so she had fewer problems than most people. 

What really put the bee in Perceptor’s proverbial bonnet was Optimus’s sudden, alarmed realization that my prospectus defense was coming up, and unless we could figure out how to make the projector work on the lawn (and reserve the main quad for my defense, which at a large public university, was NOT going to happen), he was going to be parked in a service lot, skyping into his own student’s prospectus defense. Or we’d have to hold it on the seventh floor of the administrative building, the tallest on campus, and he’d have to stand the whole time and peer in at the proceedings. This being a desert, and my prospectus defense scheduled for August, no one found this appealing. The shaded parking garages had shitty reception. No one wanted the window open that long. Optimus might have been big and tough, but he really didn’t want to stand for that long, either. 

So he (very gently) got on Perceptor’s case, and Perceptor came up with a solution well before I got back. 

Which is a very circuitous way of explaining how this situation arose:

“No. No. NO. Terrible idea. She can’t do it.”

“[Name Redacted] regularly manages classrooms of up to 150 students.” Optimus sounded longsuffering and patient. “Surely it won’t be too much to supervise three high school students and assorted Autobots for two hours?”

“At Ikea,” said Lennox in the tones of someone explaining a very simple concept to someone who frankly doesn’t get it. Which he was. Optimus Prime had not been inside an Ikea. Optimus Prime didn’t quite understand how many glorious opportunities Ikea offered to get lost. 

“The undergraduate students often are working with chemicals and delicate equipment. Aside from blowing up an outlet last year, no disaster has occurred under [Name Redacted’s] supervision. And the building report attributed that to an existing electrical fault.”

“Ikea,” said Lennox, staunchly. “And Miko.”

It gave Optimus pause. It’d already given me pause. 

“She’ll have Jazz and Bumblebee.”

Lennox just stared at him. As much as _believe in yourself_ is a good idea? I was with Lennox on this one. No way did I want to deal with hyper Miko. No way in hell. Let alone Ikea.

“I cannot send Sam,” said Optimus. “Mikaela said she was uninterested.”

Silence.

Something shifted in how Optimus was holding his antennae. It made him look a little bewildered. “Do you think you ought to go?”

“I’m needed here,” said Lennox, with alarm. “Also, no way. You could not pay me. No.”

Heavy sigh.

“Are you saying,” said Optimus, “that I ought to go?”

Lennox had obviously not expected this. And then his face broke into a wide grin. An almost maniac grin. A worrying grin. 

“Yes,” he said. “ _Absolutely.”_


End file.
